Climate Energy
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Foreign oil follies: Stop Obama if you think you’ve heard this one before
President Obama is talking big about reducing our consumption of foreign oil. We predict he’ll be just as successful as his predecessors … After the BP oil spill, The Daily Show did a roundup of past presidential calls for us to use less oil. As Jon Stewart concluded, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool […]
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How America could easily add 6 nuclear reactors’ worth of hydro power
A new analysis by Oakridge National Laboratory (ORNL) says that America could generate 12.6 gigawatts of always-on peak baseload power just by adding electrical generation capacity to existing dams that don't already have it. That's 12 6 (big) nuclear reactors' worth — the average reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant produced only 0.78 GW. [Update: Jesse Jenkins […]
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A year after the deadly Upper Big Branch mine disaster, not much has changed
Today marks the one-year memorial of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, which killed 29 workers. Massey Energy Co., which ran the Upper Big Branch mine, will idle production at its 60 underground mines today — but as safety reports and lawsuits pile up, it becomes increasingly clear that a one-day shutdown is not enough. […]
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Future of Pennsylvania is dystopian wasteland studded with natural gas wells
Time's cover story "Could Shale Gas Power the World?" is all about how we're going to get ourselves out of our current energy crisis by turning the Marcellus shale formation into a hydrocarbon war zone pockmarked with loud, noxious natural gas wells. The reserves in question happen to be underneath some of the most densely […]
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In face of ‘peak everything,’ governments shrug at environmental cost of energy
Less than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the U.S. government has begun issuing new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Pundits think that despite a pause in the "nuclear renaissance," the same thing could happen to nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima, at least outside the U.S. The […]
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The coal power industry’s willfully deceptive picture of EPA rules
Every Republican who’s come within shouting distance of a microphone in the past year has charged the EPA with out-of-control, unconstitutional job-killing malefaction — “regulatory overreach” for short. More than a few conservative Dems, led by the crudely pandering Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have followed suit. This is their way of advocating for […]
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New reality show is ‘Ice Road Truckers’ for coal miners
The Spike network is set to run a show about coal miners, in the mold of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers — gritty dudes fighting their way through the world’s hardest jobs. This has the potential to expose coal’s seamy underbelly, or to glamorize it beyond repair (at least in the minds of Spike-watching […]
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Japanese utility baffled that nuclear plant leak couldn’t be plugged with shredded newspaper
Newest terrifying thing at the Fukushima Daiichi plant: A breach in a trench is leaking highly radioactive water into the surrounding ocean. Japanese utility TEPCO tried over the weekend to use concrete to plug the leak. When that failed, they went for the next most logical solution: a mixture of "132 pounds of sawdust, 18 […]
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The earthquake kit: How to unpack for a disaster and survive the unexpected
What’s in your earthquake survival kit? And what’s not?Photo: Global XThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. The first American responses to the triple calamity in Japan were deeply empathetic and then, as news of the Fukushima nuclear complex’s leaking radiation spread, a lot of people began […]
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Think energy efficiency isn’t working? Think again
Imagine a press release with this message: We’re not using more household energy than we used to — and the latest data won’t be available until next year. If you read that, I’m guessing you would join me in yawning and moving on to the next story. That is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA), […]
